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Monday, August 3, 2009

Rendering Challenge Winner!

After receiving way more emails than I suspected I have finally chosen a winner for The Revit Kid Rendering Challenge. I was very curious to see what kind of feedback and solutions I would receive and boy did you all feed my crave for curiosity. No a single one of my readers had the same solution. Let me repeat that again. Every single one of you who submitted had solutions that were completely different.

Everyone had roughly the same results but completely different means of getting those results. Before I go onto the winning solution I would like to go over some of the solutions I did not chose and brief reasons why.

Here is one email:

Here’s my solution to the render issue… Just make a copy of the lighting family being used in the ceiling, but delete the geometry from it. Then all you have to do is hide the ceilings. I’ve attached an image.

It is easy to tell by the rendering that the results are decent and look nice. The only problem I have with this solution is managing two light fixtures. If you move the light fixture with the geometry it will not reflect in that scene until you move the other light fixture.

One last solution before the winner:

Get rid of all interior artificial lights, turn sun on, drop exposure value to around 2ish, set time of day to just after midnight, set no clouds, hit render.

This is most certainly a workaround of sorts and i encourage all of you to experiment with this option because the results are very nice. The problem is that you will not have any of the artificial lighting effects correct. The questions specifically asks for artificial lighting. Although the look may be the same there will be no task lighting, effect lighting, spot lighting, etc...

Now.... the winner of the first ever Revit Kid Challenge is....

Eric Stewart!

I will simply replicate his email because it was that good:

I have a solution but it may not be the best.

"I modeled a simple two room plan. In one room I have a wood floor and in the other a tile floor. I placed the "Ceiling Light - Flat Round.rfa" in several places. However, as it is out of the box, the family will display in the renderings, which is the problem to begin with. So I edited the family and added a new object style to "Lighting Fixtures" called "Fixture."


For each of the objects defining the fixture I changed its object style to my newly created style. Once reloaded in the project make sure that subcategory is turned off.

Click here to see Image.

Now, when you render, the fixture will not show.


Looking forward to other answers/solutions."


This solution is the route that I would have taken to solve this problem. Using the power of the program and ability to turn objects off without having to create new separate entities is key. Now the rendering will update when you change the reflected ceiling plan or anytime you make any change to the fixture.

Congratulations Eric and please email me your information so I can send you your very own Revit Kit t-shirt.